Distortion
by SomethingI'veForgotten
Summary: Everyone's got a different story  truth and fiction blend with what little facts are left. ::SPOILERS for the end:: A little exploration of an end...


**Disclaimer:** Do. **Not.** Own. Death Note. Nope. Not a bit. It makes me sad. (In my pants. No rly.)

**WARNING: **(Ooooh, it's all capital and such like on those bottles!) SPOILERS for the end. If you haven't gotten past L, this won't make any sense to you. Based more on the manga verse, and a little exploring of my own.

**A/N:** So. I dapple once again in the craft of writing - this time, with an anime of a genre completely different from my usual! (Seriousness, ftw.) Uh. This was an sad attempt at something from a little idea that popped into my head - something about traumatic events being absorbed into the very walls of places and having a tendency to repeat over and over - what a Nothingness that would be. Reliving your last days----anyway, though I do have the manga available to me, I haven't actually...peeked into it for a long time, and am waiting for the DVDs so...looking to the anime won't necessarily help me. For you die hard fans out there/people who live in Japan and can correct my train routes, feel free to point out any mistakes I make. (I just remember Daikoku was where the wharf was...) Other than that...I hope this is a satisfactory-enough contribution to the fandom.

There are whispers – mostly from girls in uniformed short skirts and flashing phones in hand, huddled together as though they needed each other's support – among the _clack-clack_ rhythm of the train and rustle of worn newspaper, that the warehouse by the dock passed by the Kanto-Daikoku red line was haunted. The juniors, with their glittering makeup over slanted eyes to cover-up the inanity that permeates through their very pores and the high-pitched giggles found so alluring, would tell that it was some tragic story. _A murder_, they'd whisper to their friend with the faint chime of metal decorations hitting each other. _They tortured him, killed him slowly. It was gruesome._

And it was gruesome, doubtless. The old warehouse was abandoned and old, dust blanketing its cold rafters and obscuring the windows. It smelled of attics and rotting wood, of rusting metal and rats, and the seldom times it _is_ used, of grease and oil. Hooks that used to be strong and well cared for swing in unfelt winds for attention, creaking like an old rocking horse. Puddles dotted the floor, miniature lakes for the pests that bred there in that haven, where their family's scurrying feet echoes among eternal loneliness and damnation and murder.

_Don't you know?_ They'd ask each other, Oriental eyes widened with horrified fascination, alacritous words tumbling from mouths used to spreading gossip. _They say it was horrible. Kidnapped – a young kid, just our age! – and tortured too. They cut her bit by bit,_ and a shudder and thrilled shriek rippled through the small gathering. Glittering lips trembled and parted and continued spinning a spider web of mere observation. _She was good-looking – they went for her face. No! Yes! No! Really! I heard it from a reputable source. After that, they broke her arms and legs and killed her slowly enough she begged._

That was the whole story, anyway.

The girls would speak of howling noises left behind from the attack, of wails and cries and demands of _justice, justice, JUSTICE!_ Sometimes, those with a bit more sense and have dappled in the forbidden art of news reading, will speak of a figure fading into time; an once (in)famous glowing pillar of divinity. They'd question his apprehension, his anonymity, and even shine with a bit of reverence when they wistfully wished that the poor ghost of the warehouse would get their due by God.

The workers, however, have a faintly different story. They speak of soft whispers – voices muffled by the past trying so hard to be heard; yet echoing to the point of madness. When dusk pounces and filters in through the speckled windows, a dull brown like that of clotted and crusted blood shining in like corrupt shafts of holy light, they come. Soft and unignorable, hurried, excited. Something is happening because they feel it pulse through their veins, the chill down their back, the hair rises on their arms and neck and it rises with chaos, and you feel that too as thickly as if you were nearly witnessing it yourself. Fast paced, rapid-fire insults, rising, rising, RISNG – STOP.

And it's silent.

And there's nothing. Just an old warehouse labeled number 364, standing on grime and oil and mottled with murky puddles that sustain the filthiest of life, with sweating, confused people standing around in fading light. And then the light's gone, the florescent ones flicker to half-death, and shadows are moving across the walls. And there's nothing, besides them and their harsh breathing and their many, many, childish questions.

_It's got to be in our minds_, they think, like all sane people do, right before it happens. A sound like gunshot – though not really, because it's very hard for honest workers to get the money to pay for such a thing, let alone go through the trouble of all the tests and regulations to even get a license to carry one – and suddenly the main event unfolds like pulling apart an expensive necklace. Cries and pleas, desperate, selfish, _unhinged._ There's a voice loud and clear and tolling, a death knoll for all those who are too mortal to let go of their flesh. _I don't want to die! I don't want to die!_ Those wails wrench the air, choke the life out of what was left and leave the area distorted.

Suddenly the corners don't match, the air is too thick and humid and clogged, and the puddles are sludging, a sinful substance swirling on its surface. The shadows have large feathery wings and a joker's smile tinted red, there's shuffling like a body bag and it goes on and on, begging relentlessly. _I don't want to die,_ it cries feverishly, and the workers aren't sure what scares them more: that sense has fled the building, that the air feels as stifling as a plastic bag over the head, or the phantom voice whose pitch is laced with broken sanity and pathetic, selfish fear.

They get the foreboding sense that this alternate reality created by this horrible place and its wailings are something to be pitied. They're too afraid, because it feels like they aren't alone. It doesn't feel like spirits, some of the more sensitive ones would say. _It ain't human._ They reluctantly mutter to a sympathetic ear over an acrid foamy beer in the crowded pub, low voices just barely drifting the scant distance between them over the joyous noise of the others. Their eyes are wide and unfocused, mind having traveled back to the wharf with it's secret and that pleading, pleading voice. _Times, I felt like something was watchin' me and laughin' the whole time._

The police would say nothing. The wharf is just a wharf, the warehouse an old but still slightly useful building. The whispers don't exist any more than does Santa Claus or Momo Tarou. Products of exaggerated shadows and dim lights; _we'll install more and that'll solve things._ There is no record of a murder or a crying man begging for what he took, no innocent victim of a madman hell-bent on peeling humans of their skin like apples, no jester of hell laughing at the follies of Men.

There is a man in the police force who averts his eyes as he repeats what everyone else says, but no one has ever noticed that either. There is a letter that knows, but he won't say, let alone show his face. There is a mental patient that laughs and laughs and laughs to himself, the cracks in his mind showing through his face the way his grin splits and eyes wander. He awaits Death Row whilst babbling about gods and death and justice, but quiets after the nurses give him candy-colored pills.

There is a grave, unmarked, unvisited, unknown. And there is a widow with no family (aside from a catatonic daughter sitting in her room) that grieves with her head on the table on nights no one comes to remind her of her loneliness; but not even she knows about that forlorn sob begging: _I don't want to die!_ Nor will she ever hear it, and that's the best sort of mercy out there.

And so these events repeat. In day, it folds up tight and orderly like neat, crisp origami boxes. Nothing is out of place, just a vague sense of wonder. But as day turns to night, when the light turns to rotting blood and the jester's eyes haunt the back of your mind, it unravels faster than a ball of yarn and calamity breaks loose. Voices of the past relive their terror and cry out once more, ringing high above the rafters and evict even the roaches of their wits.

The day that a God was proven mortal and brought to his knees before the next generation has been erased from writing, and forever lives on in the wretched bawl of: _I don't want to die!_


End file.
